


Human Wreckage

by jukeboxhound



Series: Perspective & Opinion [3]
Category: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy XIII
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bisexual Character, F/F, Genderfluid Character, Hipster!Squall, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-11
Updated: 2015-01-11
Packaged: 2018-03-07 02:07:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3156995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jukeboxhound/pseuds/jukeboxhound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one wins in the Oppression Olympics, but some people do suck better than others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Human Wreckage

**Author's Note:**

> I have been in all of these conversations in one way or another.
> 
> Cosmo Canyon is the closest FF equivalent I could think of to the American First Nations, so yeah. Elemental materia = Classical Greek elements, y/y???
> 
> **Warning** : Brief mention of sexual assault in passing, unrelated to any characters.

 

...

Because of the academic leave that Lightning had taken to settle things with the court, her baby sister, and their custody case, she had missed some of the early prerequisites and ended up having to take one of the freshman courses as a senior.

"What is 'modernity'?" is the professor's first question.

"Progress," one student volunteers. Lightning twitches as the professor writes the word on the whiteboard without comment.

"Technology," says another. The professor adds that one, too.

"Advancement," adds a third, apparently not realizing its redundancy and vagueness to the point of meaninglessness.

"Equality," says the first student in a confident voice.

Lightning, sitting near the middle and to the side in the relatively small classroom, sees the professor write EQUALITY, and she can't stop the, " _No_ ," that bursts out.

"No?" repeats the professor.

"All of those are wrong," she says fiercely.

"Can you explain why?"

" _No_ , I _can't_ , because they are _just that wrong_."

The day never improves from there. She accidentally gets in a conversation with a male student who has a reputation for being a dom in the BDSM scene; while Lightning has no real opinion on that scene one way or the other, the fact that this guy jokes about his sub owing him sexual favors makes her question his involvement.

"You do realize that consent isn't part of a barter system, _especially_ one that plays with power dynamics," she says, not even bothering to make it into a question because _it shouldn't have been a question in the first place_ , and the guy smiles a confident, infuriatingly sympathetic smile and replies, "Oh, trust me, I know all about that."

Really.

And when she later overhears him telling someone about his conversation with "a women's studies major," she crosses the dining hall, leans a hip against his table, and tells him, "Actually, my degree is in sociology, but I believe that sexual consent is less a women's issue and more of a human rights issue because I'm a _decent fucking human being_." And also a human being who knows that a large proportion of her social circle has, at one point or another and at least once, been raped, either violently or through coercion, by men (and, once, a woman) not always so different from _this_ one.

On the bus off campus, she hears someone reading jokes from some decades-previous comedian aloud. When they finally get to, "My wife said she wanted to take a vacation to a place she hadn't been to in years, so I took her to the kitchen," she calmly stands up, walks over, and says, "Gender-based humor is both offensive and the laziest form of so-called humor because the victim of the joke becomes the punchline. The woman gets laughed off as being too uptight and told to get laid while the very real discrimination she experiences _every day of her life_ is invalidated. The next time you decide to talk out loud, I seriously suggest you reconsider before one of those women finally kick your balls back up into your pelvis because Goddess forbid you ever grow the fuck up."

She loses her favorite pen somewhere between leaving her last class and getting off the bus. One of the patches on her bag catches on something and gets torn almost in half. Someone in a trilby and with only one cuff of their jeans rolled up nearly runs her over with his fixed-gear bike. Fang sends her a text canceling the plans they'd had for dinner, even though they'd been planning that dinner for two weeks, and Lightning can't even be upset about it because it has to do with Fang and Vanille's own custody case and last-minute hearings.

By the time she stalks through the Starbucks door, she's contemplating the possibility of spontaneously developing magical powers capable of burning the world clean, resolving to ask Aeris about it in the (very) near future.

"I'll take a venti iced skinny hazelnut macchiato, sugar-free syrup, extra shot, light ice, no whip, caramel drizzle," says the businessman at the counter immediately in front of Lightning. The barista dutifully notes it all down in that mysterious coffee shop shorthand and, in a Herculean show of self-control, somehow refrains from throwing the venti iced skinny hazelnut macchiato with sugar-free syrup, an extra shot, light ice, no whip, and caramel drizzle in the businessman's face. Lightning has a momentary feeling of kinship with the barista as she orders her plain iced coffee.

Squall's already sitting at their usual table. Not for the first time Lightning wonders if he's grown into the chair like a mushroom and spends his days wallowing in existential angst as he tries to freeze the other patrons to death by glare alone. "Starbucks should hire you as a sponsor," she informs him as she sits down.

"What?"

"You sit there so often you've formed into another piece of furniture."

He arches an eyebrow in a mild _what crawled up your ass and died_ look. Lightning ignores him with great prejudice in favor of pulling out a notebook and a pencil, pretending she can't see the way he's eyeing her with creepy intensity.

"Did Fang have to cancel?"

Lightning twitches and braces herself for the questions anyone else would be asking: why ( _she had to_ ), what happened ( _the legal system_ ), aren't you angry ( _stupid fucking question_ ), why do you stay with her when you rarely get to see her ( _because I love her_ _more than the legal system and canceled plans_ ). But Squall just eyes her a little longer, nods a bit, and goes back to his book.  Her shoulders unknot with relief.

She's in the middle of staring at a blank sheet of paper when Squall audibly chokes on his coffee. He's looking between his phone and his coffee like he just found out they were conspiring against him with Seifer.

"Wrong hole?" Lightning deadpans, because she's fucking hilarious and now thinking about the last time she saw Squall and Seifer together. It's a train wreck on the level of _Romeo and Juliet_ , if Romeo were only slightly less of a two-timing asshole and Juliet a Converse-wearing cloud of misanthropy. Instead of punching her in the face, or at least trying to, Squall just holds up his phone. She leans forward over her coffee and peers at it, careful not to touch Squall's hand to steady it.

Now, Cloud's ability to envision a hundred moving, little parts as a working whole doesn't extend to his life outside the garage. When he isn't working part-time at the _Seventh Heaven_ , stoically putting up with recovering alcoholics celebrating their sobriety with a few shots, he's delivering packages between businesses, subbing for other TAs in the engineering department, or hanging out with the kids down at the local shelter. He's rarely where anyone anticipates, and expecting him to pick up his phone is about as reliable as playing the lottery for a retirement plan. Therefore, when Lightning sees _Spiky Ass_ at the top of the text conversation above, _'zolom med,'_ she can't blame Squall for his reaction and just raises a questioning brow.

"A medium-sized zolom can constrict around a man and kill him within two minutes, usually by crushing his ribs if he doesn't suffocate first."

Lightning thinks about this. "I'm guessing Cloud is either at the _Heaven_ or babysitting a group of freshmen," she finally says.

"Probably either someone who insists on sharing the minute details in his life story or another teenager convinced he's figured out how to make a frictionless plane."

Squall's phone chirps. He swipes the screen, hesitates, then holds it out again. Lightning reads aloud, "' _repent or sin will consume u_.' …Ah. One of the Yevonite churches just finished services. Must be the bar."

His phone chirps again (literally; after Squall had insulted the local bird racing team, Cloud did something to make the phone's alerts sound like a chocobo and then performed some kind of technological wizardry to keep Squall from changing it, and Lightning will never tell Cloud that his passive-aggressiveness is one of the reasons she likes him as much as she does). Lightning looks across the table at the upside-down screen. "' _it's all ur fault'?"_

She watches Squall send a terse, ' _How_ ,' and get back, ' _u just have to keep debating yevon's existence don't u, it's ppl like u who won't let it die_.'

He takes the time to write, ' _Those like you who fear to question the unknown are the reason that science believed the world was fundamentally composed of elemental materia for several hundred years_.'

"You should say something really libertarian," says Lightning. "Just to complete the image."

Squall pretends not to hear her by setting his phone face-down on the table and picking up his battered copy of _War and Peace_. He unconsciously hunches his shoulders, hiding the lower half of his face in his handmade, checkered scarf.

His phone chirps. Lightning grabs it before he can. _"'adolescent malboro_.' Damn."

Squall thinks for a minute, curious despite himself. "Someone who thinks they've made an original joke and should be gagged."

"'Would you like a bag'," Lightning mimics flatly. "'No, that's okay, I've got an old one at home who won't stop nagging me'. Or maybe, 'Debit or credit.' 'Either one, it all comes out of the same account.' Or how about, 'Wow, I can see you're really excited about this job.'" She sneers, "No, asshole, I'm really excited to finally see you walk out the fucking door."

Squall, who worked a coffee shop for three whole days before getting fired after a customer walked out sobbing, glares at her. "Have some goddamn mercy."

"Why?"

Chirp. "' _cactuar 1000 needles.'_ " Lightning hums in thought. "Hmm. Someone who's getting touchy and needs to be restrained until they learn better. Wasn't there something about a customer with shingles?"

"Who announced that they had shingles and then stroked his bare arms?"

They both shudder.

The next hour is spent with Squall burying his nose in his tome, making angry notes in the margins, and Lightning flipping listlessly through her textbook, trying to remember why throwing it at a freshman's head in the next lecture is a bad idea. They're disrupted every so often by one of _Spiky Ass'_ texts, prompting a few minutes' guessing over what minor incident warrants violent, literally monstrous retribution.

Squall has managed to mark up three pages and Lightning has filled up half a notebook page with abstract doodles by the time Cloud's distinctive tread crosses the shop's threshold and he drops his messenger bag carelessly on the floor.

"Fuck my life," he declares simply.

Lightning wordlessly kicks out the third chair for him. He doesn't even bother ordering something to drink, just sits down hard with an aura of whiskey-tainted _I am so done with the world_ and slouches.

"So, how about that Besaid Aurochs game last night," Lightning starts to say before Cloud shoots her a look of death and a snarled, "I _swear to the Planet_ that if either says a _word_ about sports –"

She holds up her hands in surrender and Cloud trails off with an irritated mumble. His forehead is all wrinkled and his hair more unruly than usual, stress carving shadows a little more deeply along the lines of his face with the thousand little frustrations that come from dealing with equally-stressed people. It's a cycle of deceptively mild viciousness, the gift that keeps on giving, almost worse than a straightforward fight because you don't realize how hard it's hitting you until all your bones are broken.

"When I TA'd for an anthro class," she says impulsively, "I had to explain to a girl why putting two streaks of paint on either of her cheeks and saying she was from Cosmo Canyon for Halloween was racist."

Cloud cringes.

"And _then_ the other TA argued with me and said I was overreacting and just looking for something to get offended about. I reminded him that he's a white cis male majoring in bio telling a _sociologist_ about racism."

"Did you tell him to go fuck himself?"

"I also told him to go fuck himself."

"Well, you _are_ pretty white," says Squall.

"Well, you _are_ a white cis male, so I still win."

"Oppression Olympics, really?" Cloud drawls. The other two subside sulkily into an awkward silence, which Cloud breaks with, "This customer was telling me about how awesome electric flyswatters are and how he used one to kill over seventy-five flies in a single day. When his pitbull went to go bite another dog he swatted her on the flank with it and she yelped. This guy made a yelping sound so I knew exactly what his pitbull sounded like and how effective the electric flyswatter was."

Squall – whose favorite necklace is shaped like a lion, whose favorite show is an old serial about a guy who fights monsters in order to _rescue_ them, whose closest friend is a snow-white wolf hybrid named Shiva he saved from people who didn't know jackshit about wolf hybrids – makes a sound like he'd come home to find someone had destroyed all of those things. He tears the cardboard cup sleeve in half.

"A boy younger than I am told me that my skinny body is really sexy," says Lightning.

"A man three times older asked if I wanted to go on a date with him to a foreign film festival," sighs Cloud. "Then he never came back because he realized I'm not always a girl, not because I turned him down."

"When I tell them I'm a lesbian, that usually makes them come back _repeatedly_."

Abandoning the cardboard sleeve, Squall restlessly taps his fingers against the side of his coffee. After a pause, he says, "I was once laughed out of a SeeD office when they found out I'm bi."

"Because you don't exist?" Cloud guesses.

"Because you're gay and in denial?" Lightning counters.

"Because you're straight and just a hipster?"

Squall tips his coffee towards both of them. They sit in a small pocket of silence surrounded by the tuneless buzz of conversation and hissing espresso machines. Eventually, Cloud's head tips forward until his forehead lands on the table. "People _suck_ ," he says, muffled, into the laminate.

"Some better than others," Squall replies, sips at his coffee, and it takes a solid minute for Cloud and Lightning to turn and look at each other and realize that, yes, _Squall_ had said _exactly_ what it sounded like, and they abruptly burst into laughter. Someone at the next table jumps at the sudden sound, banging her knees on the table's underside. It just makes them laugh harder.

Squall rolls his eyes, but the rim of the coffee cup doesn't do a very good job hiding the small smile.

 


End file.
